This blog is totally independent, unpaid and has only three major objectives.
The first is to inform readers of news and happenings in the e-Health domain, both here in Australia and world-wide.
The second is to provide commentary on e-Health in Australia and to foster improvement where I can.
The third is to encourage discussion of the matters raised in the blog so hopefully readers can get a balanced view of what is really happening and what successes are being achieved.

Monday, December 21, 2015

Weekly Australian Health IT Links – 21st December, 2015.

Here are a few I have come across the last week or so.

Note: Each link is followed by a title and a few paragraphs. For the full article click on the link above title of the article. Note also that full access to some links may require site registration or subscription payment.

Reporter for The Canberra Times

Procurement spending by the Australian Public Service soared by $10 billion in the past financial year with Commonwealth agencies splashing nearly $60 billion of taxpayers' cash in 2014-2015.

New figures from the Finance Department show nearly $10 billion of the total went to pay external "management and business professionals" and on "administrative services" in the wake of the loss of thousands of full-time public service jobs.

Another $13 billion was spent on "politics and civic affairs" as spending on external services grew to $39 billion, twice the $20 billion spent on goods.

The figures, compiled from contracts notified on the AusTender website, reveal the procurement spending by the Australian Public Service has exploded by nearly 100 per cent since 2010-2011, when $32.6 billion was spent, to more than $59 billion in 2014-2015.

Taxpayers to be left even further out of pocket.

IBM is going after the Queensland government for all the legal fees it incurred defending itself against the state’s compensation lawsuit over the pair's failed health payroll project.

The technology giant, which was the prime contractor for the 2007 replacement of Queensland Health’s legacy payroll software, wants the government to cover the full cost of its successful application to have the case thrown out of court.

It also wants to be compensated for all the cash it spent fighting the original lawsuit filed in the Brisbane Supreme Court in December 2013.

Last week Justice Glenn Martin ruled in favour of IBM’s push to have the Queensland case thrown out of court, based on a waiver of liability signed by both parties in 2010.

Colin McCririck takes on more responsibility.

Queensland Health has promoted its chief technology officer Colin McCririck to the top job at its new spun-out electronic health division, where he will take the lead on operational and strategic health IT for the state.

The former CTO of Queensland Health said he will work with industry, academia and startups in delivering an integrated, digital health system

eHealth Queensland has found itself a new CIO and chief executive – Colin McCririck, who was CTO at Queensland Health for about a year.

McCririck will help implement the state’s eHealth Investment Strategy (2014-2018). This includes $300 million in ICT infrastructure, $130 million in digital technology and $30 in information interoperability across 16 hospital and health services (HHSs).

Accusations to be laid bare in February 2016.

Victoria’s corruption watchdog has announced a dedicated inquiry into the state Department of Education’s failed Ultranet student portal implementation, following allegations of “serious corruption” within the organisation.

The Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission (IBAC) will begin hearings into the $180 million IT project in February 2016 off the back of Operation Ord, which touched on some suspect dealings in the procurement phase of Ultranet.

IBAC will probe relationships between executives of the Department of Education and the consortium selected to deliver the project - CSG (since acquired by NEC) and Oracle.

The National E-Health Transition Authority (NEHTA) is pleased to announce the publication of the Conformance Test Specification for PCEHR Views.

Who does this affect?

Developers that want to implement one of the PCEHR Views will find in the Conformance Test Specification the test cases that must be passed as a prerequisite to declaring conformance to the presentation requirements.

Developers that have already implemented one or more of the PCEHR Views may use the conformance test specification when they migrate to a new version of the Views.

Inside Queensland’s latest payroll saga.

The Queensland election couldn’t have come at a worse time for Datacom.

In late 2014 the IT services company was on the verge of signing a massive, hard-won deal with Queensland’s Public Safety Business Agency to take over the job of processing the wages of all the state’s ambulance and prison officers, firies, and non-frontline support workers.

The business process outsourcing would hand end-to-end payroll processing to Datacom on its SAP platform, and take the state government off the hook for the replacement of its long out-of-date LATTICE payroll technology.

iTnews understands Datacom had spent a very large sum of money on the bidding process at this point.

Technology Reporter

It's been a tough few weeks for the Prime Minister's record on the national broadband network (NBN), though you might have missed it amid all the talk about "innovation" and "the ideas boom".

Back in April 2013, then shadow communications minister Malcolm Turnbull unveiled a plan to bury Labor's fibre-to-the-premise (FTTP) NBN with a three-word slogan: Fast. Affordable. Sooner.

It's turning out to be a bit of a shoddy, delayed, sticky tape and rubber band and gaffer tape solution.

Senior telco executive

Cost blowouts and delays had turned Labor's nation-building exercise into a political disaster. Fibre would have meant internet speeds light-years faster than copper, but at a price. The opposition's promise of an NBN delivered years sooner and $60 billion cheaper – with 25Mbps download speeds to all Australians by 2016 – sounded unbelievably good.